How much is known about North America in MotRD? In many ways the Western Genre and the Victorian Genre are quite different even though they take place roughly at the same time in history. How would European Victorian characters find themselves at east in the Wild West? How would you combine the Old West with the Gothic horror genre? Do you think players will be disappointed by wanting to create western heroes and finding that this is in fact a horror game?

What movies and books successfully convey the atmosphere we might be looking for here?

Havard wrote:How would you combine the Old West with the Gothic horror genre?

For examples of weird west in literary, movies and tv shows, Wikipedia has a full list of recommendations.

Deadlands first and foremost comes to mind.

Thanks! I don't know if "Weird West" is a good model for North America if one wants to stay true to the core ideas of MotRD though? If you are open to tinkering with the world, then I am sure it would be fun to bring MotRD into full steam punk mode, but I am also thinking about a purely horror based old west.

Deadlands, I am sure could be useful though. Also, possibly WoD's old Werewolf the Wild West as well as Northern Star, if only for a d20 representation of North America.

I wonder though if Victorian ideals and the ideals of the Old West could ever be combined without complete disaster for a campaign?

If one wants to use D20 Modern, they can supplement that with D20 Past. In addition Grim Tales has a variant for Gritty Magic that would be entirely acceptable for use in a MotRD game. It would be easy to tack on the rules from D20 Ravenloft/MotRD to the Grim Tales spell-casting system. Alternately one could run easily run MotRD using Grim Tales exclusively as it is a variant on D20 Modern and adds in class tropes of 3E as talent trees. Also of note is Sidewinder: Recoiled. If you are going to use either/or-both D20 Modern and Grim Tales, Sidewinder: Recoiled is a must as it adapt Western role-playing to the D20 Modern rules-set.

Also, if one wants to use 3E or Pathfinder exclusively, I would heartily recommend picking up Nothern Crown (it can be bought as Print-On-Demand for Pathfinder through any of the One Bookshelf sites; drivethrurpg.com, etc.) There are some classes in it that I believe would be would be beneficial for Gothic/Colonial/Victorian/Western role-playing as well as some races and prestige classes that add some flair....I think I just talked myself into re-buying it.

Dragon #240 had an article titled "Mysterious Cities" that covered locations on each continent. North America got Chicago, Montreal, and Sitka. Each has sections on History and Forbidden Lore.

The Athlete kit from Dragon #215's "Putting on a New Masque" has baseball players as a sub-kit (as well as tennis, soccer, and hockey), and name-drops Christy Mathewson and Honus Wagner.

Annual #2 (1997) has "Villains of Gothic Earth," which includes a jermlaine elder in northern Appalachia, a githyanki necromancer in Boston, a clan of sahuagin at the entrance to Chesapeake Bay, and an odem in Sitka.

With the Explorer kit and the Scientist kit from Dragon you could do a whole cryptozoological sort of thing. And when you ran out of critters in N.A.and the old west you could go looking for mythological critters around the world. And as for the whole Gothic Horror thing, the D.M. decides what instills horror in the P.C.'s and the supporting cast.

Pegasus Press' "Worlds of Cthulhu" magazine issue #2 had an article entitled "The Good, the Bad, and the Utterly Insane" which was about introducing the Cthulhu Mythos to the Wild West. It barrowed a lot from "Cthulhu By Gaslight".

It doesn't take much to remove the "Cthulhu" from CoC, while still retaining the other "horror" elements (e.g. vampires or Ghouls): thus making something intended for CoC useful for other horror themed systems like MotRD.

But as others have mentioned, Sidewinder: Recoiled is very helpful as it provides dates in which particular items of equipment (particularly firearms) were introduced.